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Hacking Vim

Book Description

A cookbook to get the most out of the latest Vim editor

Create, install, and use Vim scripts

Personalize your work-area

Optimize your Vim editor to be faster and more responsive

In Detail

Each chapter of this book deals with a different aspect, and provides recipes for easy-to-use hacks to customize and simplify your Vim experience. After an introduction covering the derivation of Vim and its relatives from the vi editor, the author explains basic changes that you can make to the appearance of the Vim editor. Further chapters cover improved navigation through files and buffers in Vim; speeding up your work with templates, auto-completion, folding, sessions, and registers; and formatting text and code, including using external formatting scripts. The final comprehensive chapter covers everything about using Vim scripts and scripting to extend functionality.

Vim stands for Vi IMproved and is the editor of choice for programmers looking for a highly configurable, stable, open-source, multi-platform text editor. It is included with almost every Linux distribution as the standard text editor, and can be used to work with source code from any language. A big advantage of using Vim is that it can be extensively customized; you can control the basic interface, define personalized key mappings, implement macros, and call external or user-defined scripts. Vim has its own scripting language that allows for plug-in like extensions to enable IDE behavior, syntax scripts and highlighting, color schemes, themes, and utility scripts that can add a wide range of features and functionality.

Vim 7.0, for which this book is written, includes spell-checking, code completion, document tabs, current line and column highlighting, undo branches, and more.

This book contains hacks that cover everything from personalizing Vim according to the user’s work cycle to optimizations that will boost the user’s productivity. It does not cover the basic tasks of using the editor but instead focuses on making life easier for experienced Vim users. It is written for Vim 7.0 , the latest stable version.